(post turned into a wall of rant, oops ._.')

Well, a lot of the old games were probably "before my time" (like all of the nes/snes stuff) but some of the older games I really enjoyed playing are:
Rayman, Serious Sam (the classic versions. although the newer ones are great, too), Super Mario 64, UT 2004, Tonic Trouble (not sure if anyone even knows this one), Day of the Tentacle, Halo and probably a handful more.

Of course there's always the nostalgia aspect so I don't want to praise these games too much but to me it feels like the games from those 10-15 years had a lot more effort, heart and soul put into them. I mean yeah, games back then often had bugs, bad controls or various other flaws and there also were quite a few terrible games, but it feels like in most cases the devs cared a lot more for what they were creating. This has become pretty rare in my opinion, especially with triple-a titles.

Over the years (just like with pop music (no offense :P)) mainstream games turned into that tasteless homogenous blend and I guess some people got so used to it that they don't even like things in a different way. In terms of games I'm also talking about that endless easy-gratification approach. I don't consider this a bad thing as it can make games more fun to play, but in many cases there is nothing but this stuff with little to no meaning behind it and it's sometimes completly exploited (that lootbox crap is prob. the best example).

I don't wanna sound too negative, though. There still are triple-a games that I really like and many aspects got a lot better. Graphics (obviously), controls, storytelling (if you pick the right games), etc. and there's a much bigger variety to coose from.
Also there are much more indie devs today, which dare to try a lot of new things compared to bigger studios and have produced quite a few hits. The only problem I see with indie games is that there are more and more games that better wouldn't have made it to the release. I know it sound's cold, but with powerful engines like Unreal Engine, Cryenging, whatever... it's getting (potentially) much easier and faster to create a game. But in my opinion, the low-level knowledge about how things work and what you're doing is almost as important as it was before. The difference is that today you can make a game without it. As a result there are simply a lot of really bad games (it's usually flaws in controls, content, game design in general, polishing or optimizations). They look halfway decent on screenshots because those engines offer pretty advanced graphics features (even though people often don't know how to use them properly :[ ), but playing the game is a whole different story.

Anyway, I guess I'll stop here, I've been writing for way too long